AWOW AK41 Mini Desktop PC – TeamViewer with Linux – Week 10

This is a weekly blog chronicling my experiences of using the AWOW AK41 Mini Desktop PC on Linux.

Remote Desktop Control displays the screen of another computer (via Internet or local area network) on a local screen. This type of software enables users to use the mouse and keyboard to control the other computer remotely. It means that a user can work on a remote computer as if he or she was sitting directly in front of it, regardless of the distance between the computers.

In the realm of remote desktop software, there’s lots of choices. The obvious focus is VNC related software. There’s lots of VNC clients available. But I’ve received lots of requests to look at TeamViewer.

TeamViewer offers remote access to a wide variety of operating systems including Linux distributions. It’s proprietary software, so you won’t find the source code available. But you can use the software free of charge to access private computers.

TeamViewer includes encryption based on 2048-bit RSA private/public key exchange and Advanced Encryption Standard AES (256-bit) session encryption, two-factor authentication, enforced password reset on unusual activity and a listing feature for trusted devices.

The AWOW AK41 offers triple monitor support. It should have sufficient CPU and GPU resources to act as a functional remote desktop, particularly when connecting to servers that have better system resources.

I had a few initial problems setting up TeamViewer on the AWOW AK41. This machine is running Manjaro. I initially installed the teamviewer 15.8.3-1 package from the Arch User Repository. The package appeared to install fine, and running the program prompted a dialog box with the license agreement, and then the GUI frontend appeared. But it said “Not ready. Please check your connection”. Strangely, I wasn’t even able to enter my email and password details.

I mentioned that TeamViewer has a listing feature for trusted devices. Thinking the connection issue might be because my AWOW AK41 box wasn’t in my listed of trusted devices, I signed into my TeamViewer’s account on their website, and added the AK41 to the device list. But even after killing the TeamViewer process and its daemon, I was no further forward.

Of course, I had committed a schoolboy error. The AUR lists a number of TeamViewer packages. I had installed an old version. After killing the TeamViewer process and teamviewerd, I installed teamviewer-latest. Now the connection error disappeared.

For the testing of TeamViewer, I used the AWOW AK41 running Manjaro as the host machine, connecting to a variety of remote machines, including machines running Ubuntu, Fedora, and Windows.

I mostly used the default settings of TeamViewer such as the auto select quality setting, although I did also experiment with the other quality settings.

Here’s a Windows machine accessed via TeamViewer with the AWOW AK41 as the host machine.

How was performance?

Overall, I am impressed by the performance of the AWOW AK41 running TeamViewer. It certainly has sufficient grunt for me to access remote systems with good interactivity and responsiveness including both Linux and Windows-based hosts.

Obviously there are limitations of accessing remote desktops even with high spec machines.

Complete list of articles in this series: